Marking the artist's first major publication in his 30-year-plus career, Mel Kendrick: Woodblocks presents a collection of the American artist's wood block prints and water drawings.

Marking the artist's first major publication in his 30-year-plus career, Mel Kendrick: Woodblocks presents a collection of the American artist's wood block prints and water drawings.

Produced over a period from the early 1990s to the present day, Kendrick's prints explore bold yet complex arrangements, all the while introducing the subtle grain of the wood, signifying the organic quality of the artist's creative process. These large-scale prints, typically measuring 3 x 2 metres in size, are largely informed by the artist's ongoing sculptural practice, in both spatial engagement and process.

Kendrick's work is discussed within the book through texts that investigate the relationship that the works hold with both architectural and artistic influencers, as well as with his well established sculptural practice, through which he has a storied history of using wood, bronze, rubber, paper and cast concrete.

"Kendrick describes and often makes his works on paper in sculptural terms. For the past year, he's been pursuing what he calls 'Water Drawings,' a series of cast-paper drawings comprising two 40-by-60-inch sheets created at Dieu Donné papermaking workshop in New York. A black pigment-coated mold is pressed into a soft mass of wet pulp, and under the force of the press the pigment spreads into the paper and binds with it. The resulting sheets are weighty-looking reliefs, with deep imprints and overlapping forms that resemble topographical views, like lakes or islands seen from an airplane window. There's also a kind of transparency to the overlapping forms, a sense of looking through one thing and connecting to another. In the act of looking, 'what's on top becomes the bottom. There's a constant exchange that gives them an internal logic.'"